Disability, Solidarity and Possibility

In Conversation with James Salanga

In this episode of Media at Risk, doctoral candidate Anjali DasSarma explores the nexus of ableism, journalism and structural oppression in conversation with journalist and media critic James Salanga. By situating journalism within a larger constellation of hegemonies, Salanga weaves narratives across histories of oppressive forces, while also recognizing the power in queer resistance, disability rights movements and other liberatory social movements.

Anjali DasSarma is a doctoral candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, where she studies journalism history, race and slavery. She draws from both critical cultural studies and critical political economy to trace the longue durée of structures of power, resistance and memory from colonial American newspapers to the future of journalism. She is invested in projects of dismantling capitalism and colonialism alongside building structures of hope and repair. She is affiliated with the Center for Media at Risk, the Media, Inequality and Change Center and the Center for Advanced Research for Global Communication.

James Salanga is an editor and producer from the San Joaquin Valley, currently based on California’s Central Coast. They’ve spent the past three years in audio journalism at NPR member stations, namely CapRadio and more recently, KAZU. James is also the co-executive director of the media criticism newsroom The Objective, which examines how systemic issues and power dynamics impact journalism inside and out of the newsroom. They’re excited to produce The Sick Times, a new weekly podcast with a focus on making Covid and Long Covid research more accessible, contextualizing the public health and grassroots responses to the current pandemic and highlighting the perspectives of those most harmed by it.

References

Music: Royalty Free Music by Theatre Of Delays courtesy of bensound.com

Photo: Abby Mahler

Transcript:

Anjali: Welcome to Media at Risk, a podcast from the Center for Media Risk at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. My name is Anjali. I’m a Doctoral Candidate at Annenberg and a Steering Committee member at the Center for Media Risk. I’m joined here today by James Salanga, a reporter and editor based in California who focuses on place, labor, disability, education, the ongoing Covid 19 pandemic and community movements. They are the co-executive director for the media criticism site, The Objective, and the podcast producer for The Sick Times, a newsroom covering the ongoing Long Covid crisis. James, I’m so grateful for your time. Thank you so much for being here and I am excited to dive right in. So can you start us off by talking about your experiences coming to journalism, working in student journalism during the beginning of the Covid 19 pandemic and get us started there.

James: First of all, thanks so much for having me. My first brush with journalism was in high school when I learned that my hometown newspaper was like, “we want volunteers.” I was like, “sure, you know, I like writing.” I also did not go into college thinking I was going to do journalism. I applied for the California Aggie, which is a student newspaper, twice my freshman year, and I got rejected both times. But then in sophomore year, I was looking for a new job and I saw that the alumni magazine had an editorial intern position open. So I applied for that, I got it, I met someone who I consider really instrumental to my journalism career. And as a mentor, he pointed me towards Next Gen Radio, which is a program that really works to uplift folks who maybe have faced barriers to getting into journalism. So that program was how I pivoted towards being interested in public media because I did the program at CapRadio, which is the Sacramento NPR member station. And from there I had a lot of other student journalism experiences that did coincide a little bit with the start of the Covid 19 pandemic. I had been the beat reporter for the cost of living adjustment protests that were going on throughout the University of California campuses.

James: I just remember I was out at a rally one day and, you know, a couple days later, boom. The newsroom was in flux because we were all figuring out, what does reporting look like right now when we’re all kind of frozen? I remember this one story that I was working on for Cal Matters about UC Access Now, which was this movement started by folks on the Davis campus in which disabled students were looking at the start of the pandemic, the transition to remote as a way to push UC to implement these measures of access that many students had been asking for for years. I think that movement also sparked for me more of a learning about disability and disability culture. As a college student, I was still unlearning a lot of really unhealthy habits about productivity or mindsets about the conflation of productivity and worth that are not just ableist, but a function of how it feels to be a worker or somebody under capitalism.

James: I remember Gabe Schneider, who’s a co-director for The Objective. He posted this article that I had been really moved by, about the ways that social media policies were erasing black journalists and black journalists’ voices. Because as folks may remember, in the summer of 2020 places like the Pittsburgh Post Gazette were reprimanding the reporters for posting “Black Lives Matter” in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. And I had been thinking a lot about objectivity that had come up for me when covering the cost of living adjustment protests, because I knew people who were organizing those protests and knew people who were on those front lines. And in college I was also adjacent to some Asian American Studies spaces. So I was thinking a lot about, you know, what does it look like to know these people to have to overlap in my beliefs and then also go into this field that feels so closed off to even the idea of people having those beliefs. You know, in journalism, if you infuse your personality into the work in the wrong way, which obviously is a coded way to say that, right? It feels like you taint the work. The work is no longer considered valid or valuable or correct, even if you know the conclusions that you’re drawing and the evidence that you’re drawing on are all sound. It’s so much about semantics and framing. So when Gabe wrote that article, I really resonated with it. He posted, you know, “if there’s other folks who are interested in writing something like this or writing other pieces like these that are looking at journalism, critiquing it hit me up.” And so I did. I wrote a piece for him about the way Filipino television station ABS-CBN was facing a shutdown due to the Duterte regime. And so I wrote about that and the tie between access to that news and its importance to Filipino Americans for whom access to these channels is the main way that they learn about news happening in their homeland that impacts their families. Working in local news, I was also honing this general mode of thinking about the industry through helping edit pieces for the objective, helping edit The Objective’s newsletter, writing my own pieces for The Objective, while also doing local news. That’s sort of my general journalism overview.

Anjali: Thank you so much. And I want to quote your Nieman Lab prediction for 2025, which I found really poignant. You wrote that ableism isn’t just about disability. It’s intimately connected to other forms of structural oppression and always has been. If newsrooms want to cover that seriously, they must begin by analyzing ableism seriously across journalism’s culture, history and frames. And that also means investing in the disability beat in 2025 and beyond, particularly by creating institutional support for disabled writers. I would love for you to pick up on those themes of ableism and disability and journalism and risk.

James: Yeah, I did this Q&A with two senior national organizers for the Disability Project and they worked on this guide that called for better reporting on disabled communities. And talking to them – their names are Sebastian Margaret and Erica Dixon – they really stressed that in this current moment, it’s really important for reporters to learn more about the history of eugenics. And that really has been something I’ve been thinking about, too. Just for example. Robert F Kennedy Jr.’s recent comments about autistic people and how they are unable to, you know, fulfill X, Y and Z. It’s not just that there are autistic people that can do those things. If autistic people with higher support needs haven’t done those things or can’t do those things, that doesn’t make them less worthy people. And this is just another way that eugenicist rhetoric has been spreading and percolating. And has been on the rise since the start of the Covid 19 pandemic. I think there’s just been kind of a lack of reckoning, internal reckoning social reckoning with the fact that this still remains such a deadly and disabling virus. You know, when working on the podcast, I am summarizing the work that the times has done in the past week. And part of that is looking at the research updates that co-founder Miles Griffiths puts together every week, and in reading these studies every single week, everything I learned is that this is really bad. And we should be taking better care of ourselves, of each other. And, you know, the information that has been put out by major news organizations around Covid 19 is not reflective of the real danger and the threat of this virus. And at the same time even if you are aware of that threat, people are not incentivized to care. And I guess that just makes me think again about the importance of reporters understanding how modern eugenics is manifesting. You know, people might think of Nazi doctors who were running eugenicist experiments on folks in concentration camps. And those doctors learned about the science of eugenics from American doctors. If we’re talking about – this administration loves to talk about the real America – eugenics is deeply rooted in American history. I think understanding eugenics is a prism to look through what’s happening right now in the ways that various categories of people are so readily being discarded from this vision of the current administration’s America.

James: You know, when I was working on that Nieman prediction, I talked to Emily Watkins, who is a reporter focused on the disability beat and they were telling me “look, I do a lot of trainings for organizations, for newsrooms that are interested in helping improve their disability coverage, which is great. But one thing that I’ve realized is that they’re more focused sometimes on the semantics on ‘what should I say?’ ‘What shouldn’t I say,’ or like, ‘what kind of language do I use?’ And less interested in thinking about this underlying existence of ableism.” All of this, you know, creating a safer environment for journalists, whether that be in terms of bodily harm, in terms of the climate in which they work just requires this huge renegotiation of so many journalistic norms that I don’t know that newsrooms are necessarily committed to doing – because it’s a lot of resources, it’s a lot of work and it’s a lot of confronting systems. You know, confronting the fact that just because a system works for you doesn’t mean that it works for people who are experiencing a different lived experience than you.

Anjali: Totally. I think this idea of imagining the future, we think about the affordances of something like movement journalism that gets us outside of some of the old school norms that are, of course, tied to these historic structures of harm. But I’m curious if you can talk a little bit about objectivity, and I know this is something you’ve been thinking about, of course, as you’re pointing to for a long time. What are your thoughts on the Ideology of journalism and the white normative figure — the View From Somewhere with Lewis Raven Wallace, or the “conquering gaze from nowhere” with Donna Haraway. And how you see yourself and your colleagues and other practitioners in your space, thinking about negotiating and undoing and unraveling and unsettling the ideals of journalism as they relate to objectivity.

James: Actually, by the time this comes out Lewis is actually working on a column for The Objective about journalism, about what? Like what he sees as movement journalism’s main purpose. It’s essentially a draft version of a movement journalism theory of change. And you can sign up for that on our site at Objective Journalism. And I will also say I graduated with a Bachelor’s in Science and Tech Studies. In the intro class for this major, the professor who taught it asked us to go and measure things with a ruler. Right. And to ask us, like “where does the ruler start?” You know. Ask us, “where does measuring one inch start?” Some people said, it starts at the very edge of the ruler. Like zero. Some people say it starts at one o, you know, there’s a little gap between the first line on the marker and the actual wooden edge of the ruler. So some people would say, oh, it starts at that mark. Some people say it starts at the total edge. And then she asked us to define what objectivity was without using the words, I think, “fair” or “unbiased.” And people were really grappling. We’re all looking at our thesaurus, trying to figure out what objectivity is. And the next slide in her presentation was the Scooby Doo gang. They’re all standing around a figure with a paper bag on their head. And on the paper bag was written “objectivity.” And Fred goes, “let’s go see who you are.” And then the next photo is him pulling off the paper bag and underneath the paper bag is subjectivity, right? And so, the rest of that class went on to talk about Donna Haraway’s paper, “Situated Knowledges,” which is this paper that proposes that objectivity is a view from nowhere.

James: It’s a God trick, as she puts it. It’s an illusion. And that really struck me because at the time I was still, you know, dipping my toes into journalism. I was working at the campus paper. And like I mentioned before, I was having all of these questions about like, what does objectivity mean to me? It’s very clear that I am Asian, that I’m Filipino, right? And for me, you know, I think I became less interested in pursuing any kind of journalism that was around objectivity and more interested in exploring: what are the power dynamics in situations, what are the systems at work and what is the truth of these systems that is being revealed by the people who are most impacted adversely by these systems. I feel really moved by the legacy of people like Ida B Wells and people today like Scalawag or even the Kansas City Defender publications that are really trying to carry on the spirit of being very explicit about their values, being very explicit about the movements that they’re aligned with, because I think that it makes their work stronger. It makes their work more like they have sustained themselves. They have found an audience because that audience exists. People want to read news that is not lying or trying to obscure where it’s coming from.

Anjali: We’ve kind of touched on capitalism across our conversation so far. When you’re thinking about these struggles against objectivity, of course objectivity has to do with profit motive about this, like quote unquote “universal audience” that is willing to pay for not seeing things that they find offensive. Right. This is of course tied into these questions of capitalism, and I would love for you to talk a little bit about how capitalism fits into how you conceive of this world, that you are critiquing and writing within, you know?

James: I think there’s just so much to dive into there because, I was talking about this earlier, for example, with regards to ableism, I think one of the big things that I am constantly negotiating is just this conflation of labor and value and the feeling that there has been this rising culture and desire for convenience which is to me part of the appeal of artificial intelligence. I think part of the reason that it has proliferated is because of capitalism, because journalism is really struggling for funding. And, you know, who is flush with money? OpenAI is flush with money. Again, that goes back to the profit motive and journalists. Journalism as a whole, I think, as an industry, is looking for ways to survive, to keep itself sustained. But I think the mainstream ways of doing that are obviously very constrained by capitalism and the limited imagination that capitalism offers, which are: you have to compete on the market, you have to sell ads, or you get funded through philanthropy. It’s just a tough situation for journalism and newsrooms to be in, where you’re at the behest of these forces. Again, journalism is placed in this reactionary position.

James: And I think there are some models, right. Like worker-owned news is something that personally gives me really a lot of hope. I mean, I saw last week, Hell Gate reached their one millionth dollar from a subscriber, which, they expressed, this is a really symbolic milestone, but it’s also one that shows that people are willing to pay for this work. There are these moments where you see that there’s this alternate path. But again, I mean, it’s also hard for people or for newsrooms to orient direction in that way because you’re also playing with people’s jobs. And then on top of that, one other way in which I see, you know, this current structure come into play is the way that, for example, healthcare is tied to employment. That is just one of the reasons that people may stay employed at a place that maybe does not align with their values because you need healthcare. I also think that to some degree, especially for reporting, having to come into the office is just the performance of being a body in a seat. Because ideally, if you’re a reporter, you’re out in the world, you’re reporting, or you’re making calls and it’s like, it’s kind of that, you know, that metaphor – turtles all the way down.

James: It’s hard to break into journalism as somebody who is marginalized, let alone somebody who is working class. Carla Murphy wrote this piece some years ago that Gabe and I have really talked about how there’s just a dearth of working class journalists. The class aspect is such a barrier to journalism opportunities. When internships were remote, that offered so many people a way to participate in furthering their journalistic experience, their expertise, to learn about how to build communities and build relationships. When you’re not in the same place as another person, you know now that the quote unquote “pandemic is over,” that’s no longer an option for a lot of people. And you’re back to asking people to work for $16 an hour or like $30 an hour in a city that maybe they’ve never moved to and asking them to move for the summer with little to no relocation stipend. And you can talk as much as you want about how you want to support under-resourced journalists. And yet you have these structures in place that are just so normalized. And I even think about the ways that some newsrooms have fellowship programs that are set up with J schools.

James: It’s like who is accessing those J schools, the people with the money and even just the cultural and social capital to understand “I should go to a J school.” It just is something that I remember seeing when I was in college, and feeling very – it’s hard not to be resentful. I think there’s this sense of hopelessness that working under capitalism engenders in people. I think what gives me hope is looking towards those organizations, organizations that are saying like, no, this is a bad culture. We shouldn’t replicate these harmful, like societal structures and we can push back against them by building something that – yes, we fully admit this is within these structures – maybe we are subject to the same funding mechanisms because of the way that capitalism functions and the way that journalism gets funded. But we can still make choices within these structures that not only reify our values but echo the world or the values that we hope other newsrooms or other news organizations will have.

Anjali: Gosh, when you were talking, it reminded me of the Voices study about J schools.

James: Oh my God, the Voices study about J schools. Instant classic. I mean, really.

Anjali: Now that it’s 2025, how little has actually really structurally changed even. And there’s this cyclical move that lMedia 2070 talks about.

James: Yeah. I feel like I’m always referencing the Kerner Commission 1968 report about the state of media in the US. And it’s partially because it’s wild to me how prescient that report is and how clear it lays out this problem of, you know, it’s specifically talking about the problems of racism in news and the ways that newsrooms cover black communities and issues that were important to black people. I have been writing this column for the Reynolds Journalism Institute. My column from that, published in April, was about just looking back at five years, right? It’s been five years and there have been all these promises of how we’re going to do better. And I love that you mentioned that there’s this positioning, this narrative positioning of “all these things have happened in the past” that completely ignores how all of these missteps have coalesced to make a newsroom, you know, less of a trustworthy figure in the community. Like, for example, just take The New York Times and its coverage on AIDS and, you know, then to see, to talk about cycles, the faulty coverage of The New York Times on AIDS, to the faulty coverage of The New York Times covering transphobia in terms of cycles. You know, I think one that has really been a point of or one that I’ve been thinking about, you know, over the past like year or year and a half is just this double standard.

James: I think seeing the ways that journalism will stand ten toes down for press solidarity. And then as soon as, you know, Palestinian journalists are asking for their Western counterparts to uplift their work, to say, “look, there is a bombardment, there’s genocide happening in Gaza; Palestinians, we need you to uplift our voices, telling the stories of our people being relentlessly attacked.” It just was such a flashpoint moment for me at the time, looking at how journalism had made such a big, you know, especially around Russia and Ukraine especially, you know, being Filipino and looking at the ways that American journalists, under the crackdown of the anti-terror law, attacking journalists in the Philippines. How American journalists have been like, “oh, look at the press climate in the Philippines. It’s so terrible. We need to stand up for our Filipino journalists who are telling the truth.” And then to turn around, look at Palestinian journalists who are asking the same thing. It just boggles my mind to see this complete, like 180. And then also to renege on all the things that happened in, you know, in 2020 when newsrooms changed their policies to acknowledge, like, look, you know, Black Lives Matter is about people’s identity.

James: You can say “Black Lives Matter” and still be a journalist who does good work. And many of the people who are signing onto this letter are people who are Palestinian, people who have relatives in the area, people who are Muslim, people who are Arab. It just felt like a slap in the face to those journalists. And then also to all the promises that had been made in 2020 around free speech, around free press, around supporting journalists bringing their full selves to work. I think part of what impedes the ability to move past these things is the fact that there is no reckoning, you know. There’s a reckoning in name only that feels very focused on, you know, again, what I was saying earlier about how Emily told me a lot of these newsrooms want to do the right thing with their words. They consider the duty of their work to end with using the proper words to describe something. It’s not just the language that needs to shift, right? It’s the entire norms, the entire frames, the entire values that need to be re-examined and retooled. Also, this goes back to profit motive. There doesn’t feel a strong financial incentive to do that.

Anjali: In this moment. I’m reminded of we had a professor from Goldsmiths, Natalie Fenton, come to our school and give this series of talks with another faculty member, Allison Hearn, about her book that she was working on, which came out, I think, Democratic Delusions. And she introduced us to David Graeber, who talks about how hopelessness isn’t natural, that it needs to be produced. And I want to ask you to think about where you are finding moments of change and hope. When you do journalism or you do history, you think about this long history of how we came to where we are now. And then we think about how we get out of where we are now.

James: You know, the map to how we get out, it’s not going to look like it is. I think it will borrow from this long history of organizing and movement journalism that people have taken up. You know, this fight, when I was interviewing some folks for a story you know, they had mentioned that one thing that was giving them hope in this current cycle is looking back again. Looking back. Actually, looking back at the ways that people have resisted oppressive regimes, have resisted fascism, have resisted racism and finding solace in the fact that maybe it is disheartening to know that we’re still struggling with those things. But there’s a record of resistance, right? I think just learning and amassing understanding of different strategies, different ways that people have fought back is really one thing that’s giving me hope. Like, I’ve been reading a lot of the early fights for queer liberation, what that looked like. And I think one book that, was also really interesting to me and also meaningful is, It Was Vulgar and It Was Beautiful by Jack Lowry. It was such a meaningful book to me, not only because of being connected to queer history, but also learning about the fact that it was people taking different routes to proceed to the same goal.

James: Because, I mean, I think so much writing on organizing focuses a lot on creativity and imagination. And I really am moved by what you said about, hopelessness can feel like a produced category because, that is how these, you know, for example, capitalism functions so that we are working at an unsustainable rate just to feel like we are valued, that we have value in this society and so that we can live again. Like looking back and also looking around is a reminder of so many people who have said, no, I, I don’t care. Things are bad. But people in the past, you know, cared enough and believed enough to try and imagine and try and work for a different arrangement of a different social arrangement, you know, to fight for rights, to fight for liberation. And so I think I’m inspired just by the efforts of people who are trying, because I think it can be really hard to sustain the part of you that wants to fight for something better, that wants to believe that things don’t have to be this way and that you as an individual have, you know, some nexus of control that you can try and make things better within.

Anjali: Journalism is so not on its own in all of these questions.

James: Oh my God. Yeah. Journalism is not on its own. And it’s like we’re talking about free press. But this is so tied to education. You know, journalism is education. We are creating educational content, whether or not journalists are thinking of it like that. This is content that is structuring people’s view of the world in one way or another.

Anjali: Kind of revisiting what we expect from journalists and what we expect from journalism requires those connections to be revitalized.

James: Solidarity that isn’t just premised on press access is really important. I think that, you know, we’re seeing more and more people get targeted for their speech. But a lot of that also goes back to these people are largely not white [unclear]. And she wrote this Op Ed and was targeted for what was probably her only published work speaking out, just asking the university President to consider passing a resolution calling what is happening in Palestine a genocide. And so I think what I’d really like to see is, I guess, just broader recognition of how our, like, journalists struggles are linked to, I mean, exactly as we were saying, like other struggles outside of the industry and how acknowledging that makes us better journalists and I think it reminds us that we’re part of communities. I think so much of journalism tries to abstract the fact that journalists are workers in their communities, but we are working in a community. We’re living in a community. The policies that happen locally and nationally and statewide are affecting us. And so, yeah, I guess I just like to emphasize that.

Anjali: You can find more information about James’s work at thesicktimes.org. I’d like to thank James so much for their time, as well as the support from the Center for Media at Risk for making this podcast possible. Barbie Zelizer is the director for the Center for Media at Risk. Learn more about the Center for Media at Risk at ascmediarisk.org. This has been Anjali DasSarma. Thank you so much for joining us.


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